Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (25 January 1922-31 August 2018) was an Italian geneticist and professor at the University of Parma, the University of Pavia, and at Stanford University who pioneered the use of genetics to try and unravel human origins and the concept of race.

Biography
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was born in Genoa, Italy in 1922, and he graduated from Ghisleri College in 1939 and from the University of Pavia in 1944. In 1949, he was appointed to a research post at Cambridge University under Ronald Fisher. In 1950, he left Cambridge to teach at Parma and Pavia in northern Italy, and he taught at Stanford in the United States from 1970 to 1992. During the 1960s, he began his studies of anthropogeny. Cavalli-Sforza summed up his work for laymen in five topics covered in Genes, Peoples, and Languages. He challenged the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and that the idea that race had any useful biological meaning at all. He also illustrated both the problems of constructing a general "hereditary tree" for the entire human race, and some mechanisms and data analysis methods to greatly reduce these problems, thus constructing a fascinating hypothesis of the recent 150,000 years of human expansion and the spread of human diversity. He died in Belluno, Italy in 2018 at the age of 96.